Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption | Hacker News Reader

Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption

electricitymap.org

153 pointscorradio135 comments

Great, but this is the other side of the coin:

https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&we...

Look at the beginning of the week on 18.December and Wind+Solar are only 5% to electricity production. Over 50% now. 5% then.

What is the end game here? Duplicate the whole infrastructure and have backup coal/gas/nuclear plants for half the time? That is why Germanys electricity prices are so high.

France: 17 cent per kwh vs Germany: 29 cent per kwh

How inefficient and/or environmentally unfriendly would it be to store the excess in batteries of some sort? I've heard that scheme pitched for solar quite a bit, so why not use the same strategy of buffering for wind?

Better than batteries is pumping water uphill into reservoirs when there is a power surplus, then recovering it as a normal hydropower plant when there is a deficit.

Governments are hesitating to use this because pump storage has major environmental impact. It just needs _a lot_ of space. You also need mountains for that and not every country has those.

There is some research going into putting concrete spheres into the ocean and pumping water in and out of them. The principle is the same but it doesn't need hundreds of hectares of forest to be cleared.

Even more efficient is to control the flow in a hydroelectric plant by stopping the generation when the demand is low. This removes the cost of pumping. If there is sufficient reserve water capacity it is done in places where the energy price depends on the market and economic incentives are there.

Hydro also has non-trivial enviromental impact - you are creating pretty big "lake" above the dam. And if you want to turn it on and off, you'll need one more to make the flow normal again.

And that reservoir can emit very significant biogenic methane. Large reservoirs for pumped storage are likely not a scalable option for climate change.

For the downvoters, here are scientific references [1,2]. I was shocked too.

[1] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es401820p

[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

One thing to note. While biogenic and thus "green", the methane is about 30 times as potent greenhouse gas (over 100 years), so we can not consider pure "carbon footprint" here. There are similar problems with restoring wetlands and undraining peatlands, which used to be carbon sinks, where biogenic methane production goes up for a while.

There are also problems with N2O emissions on the reservoirs, specially near the agricultural regions. And this is all without even talking about reducing biodiversity and destroying spawning areas for the fish by filling those with mud. So yes, efficiency is not always friendly.

This is true. High efficiency and low carbon emission are not always in the same boat.

I recently visited Cruachan ( https://www.visitcruachan.co.uk/ ) which does this, with four 120MW reversible turbines; it's great but requires very specific topology. Most countries don't have too many places they could build one.

One infrequently discussed but very real issue with pumped storage is biogenic methane. In some cases, reservoirs can make more greenhouse gas per kWh than coal(!). Earlier we thought this was just bad in tropics but more recent studies indicate it may be most strongly correlated simply to reservoir size. If these are even moderately accurate, pumped storage for significant energy storage is not an option for a carbon-free system.

[1] http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es401820p

[2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

That's really interesting. Methane is pretty bad, but at least biogenic methane doesn't increase the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Methane is far worse than CO2 though, about 30x. A process that converts one to the other while staying carbon neutral isn't what we need.

Any hydro lake works as an energy storage system - it doesn't have to be pumped.

That's why you see energy being exported to hydro-rich Norway on windy winter days. It allows water to be retained in Norway's storage lakes for later use.

Extremely. For instance, in Washington state, the BPA just had a 10-day wind lull. The 4 GWe of capacity was at a standstill. It would have taken batteries covering an American football field (with end-zones) 100 stories tall and costing $90B to fill that gap [1]. The mining and carbon footprint of that energy storage system would be very non-trivial. Pumped hydro storage is no good either due to biogenic methane in the reservoir.

[1] https://partofthething.com/thoughts/a-medium-length-primer-o...

There's individual Nuclear plants of that size and the grid already needs to plan for those to be out unexpectedly (far less predictably than wind in fact) so it doesn't seems to be that big a problem in practice.

At this size (4GWe) it was no big deal, the hydro plants can cover easily. But at 50 or 100% renewables it's much more challenging because entire regions can go down unpredictably. The 1 GWe nukes go down for outages generally in a staggered way (though not always, for instance in a common-cause design concern)

How expensive would electricity be if we could somehow factor in all the environmental costs?

Don't forget that France is heavily relying on German electricity. Especially in the winter time, France needs to shut down some nuclear power plants due to frozen rivers and but still needs electricity for heating. In the summer some nuclear power plants have to shut down as well because the rivers and thus the cooling water is too hot. In those times, Germany's reliable power sources help France to avoid major blackouts.

France only imported electricity from Germany in 2016 because a good part of the reactors had to be shutdown at the same time to investigate a dfect risk. But every other year it's Germany that buys France's electricity

France imports in hot/dry summers when the rivers are overheating from cooling the nuclear powerplants. France imports in cold winters when their nuclear reactors are not sufficient to power the electrical heating for the homes...

> However, this takes off-line about 40 percent of Germany’s nuclear capacity and Germany is one of the two countries along Great Britain from which France imports electricity during the high-usage months in the summer. The reason importing electricity from Germany and the U.K. will be particularly important for France during a drought is because 24 of its 58 nuclear reactors do not have cooling towers and purely depend on the flow of river water to cool the reactor cores. What this means is that if the level of water in rivers drops, it means that some of the reactors may have to be shut down especially those on the Rhone River in southwest France, where temperatures are expected to be particularly high due to its geographical location.

http://www.businessinsider.com/french-heat-wave-one-tumultou...

> France imports UK electricity as summer heatwave puts a third of its nukes out of action

https://thinkprogress.org/france-imports-uk-electricity-as-s...

> Germany powers France in cold despite nuclear u-turn

https://www.reuters.com/article/europe-power-supply/germany-...

> France was heavily dependent on power imports from Germany during the first cold spell of this winter, despite the fact that most of the country’s nuclear reactors are back online

http://energypost.eu/france-cant-meet-power-demand/

This doesn't really matter because there needs only to be a single day where the nuclear power plants need shut down and France goes dark in a lot of places. Over the whole month France still seems to be a net exporter to Germany but Germany only buys French electricity because its cheap.

France cannot react to a fluctuating power demand like Germany can and Germany simply takes over the French excess power. You cannot power down a (French) nuclear plant as quick as you can spin up a (German) gas turbine. So Germany operates on a stable power source of less than they actually need and import from France but if more power is needed, Germany quickly spins up their gas turbines for the time it takes to power up the coal plants. France' power plants normally run at full power and if the demand falls off, they are in a bit of trouble and rely on Germany to help them out. Be it by taking over electricity (most of the time) or delivering electricity (sometimes).

If Germany didn't take the excess electricity, France would have to burn it off.

I don't know, but I can't find anything that would support that statement. It is pretty normal that sometimes needs to buy some electricity - the European grid as a whole relies on it's interconnection. However, now - Germany has a ton of spare energy and it's evidently selling to everyone, except France... and it's winter

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16000211

Briefly:

- distribute regenerative sources geographically to have a better average production; there's always wind somewhere in Europe

- increase storage capacity through various means; e.g. pumped storage, chemical batteries

- make electricity consumption match production through various means; e.g. have (industrial) cooling and heating work in excess if there is an excess of "free" energy, charge electrical car batteries

- reduce electrical capacity requirements through gains in efficiency; e.g. improve home insulation

It's also not just a matter of production capacities: we're throwing away huge amounts of regenerative energy because we don't have the technology to a) adjust other production sources fast enough, b) store excess production and c) we don't have the infrastructure to transport it.

Don't forget dynamic pricing.

I know it is due to historic energy markets and old metering technology, but the fact that a kWh costs the same no matter the time of day is a situation that cannot continue.

And throw overcapacity at the problem. If a bad day gives you 5% renewables with the current capacity then you "only" need 20x more capacity. Combining with other solutions this overcapacity factor goes down significantly.

And once you have intermittent excess energy that is essentially free some opportunities to use it might spring up, e.g. run various electrochemical processes for free and store the products or smelt aluminium or something like that.

> What is the end game here?

Getting off fossil fuels. Specifically, it's something called the "European Grid Vision" [1]

The short version is advances in long range power distribution using DC transmission lines mean we can transmit power further with less loss than traditional high voltage AC lines. ABB has done wonders in rolling out HVDC technology [2].

But what does this have to do with the variable duty problem you ask? Alternative energies are hard to grid precisely because they are so variable as you observed. But with efficient transmission you could, for instance, collect solar in North Africa to provide power to the continent as well as pump up water into dammed fjords in Scandinavia which can be drained at night to through hydro-electric supplies. Wind in Germany or Tarifa can supplement dams one week, which can be drained the next. And of course there is always geo-thermal and nuclear.

So yes, today one needs the backup coal/gas/nuclear plants but not by 2040 in the updated roll-out schedule.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uir-BPoTN88#t=0

[2] http://renews.biz/109437/abb-transforms-chinese-grid/

Depending on North Africa which is extremely politically unstable is a horrible idea. Germany is phasing nuclear energy out. EGV is just a vision: reality is Germany routinely overloading their neighbors' grids(Czech, Polish) transmitting electricity from northern wind farms to southern and Austrian industrial centers. The neighbors are quite upset about it and are taking legal and technological(expensive investments on borders, without any German participation).

The endgame for Germany is wind + Russian gas, see Nordstream2.

Being German living in France I don't think an absolute comparison like this is telling. The EEG in Germany ( https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz) fosters development of alternative energy sources at the real cost of guaranteed purchasing prices. A good investment (see adoption https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaik_in_Deutschland) but borne by all through increased electricity costs. I never liked the price hikes but I do think it will spur further innovation in network anf storage while here in France I pay more for access than consumption and rent from owners not interested in changing windows to anything resembling insulation.

I pay 25 cent per kwh, in munich;

End game? Trying to produce as much wind and solar as possible.

Those numbers are only getting better and better with every year.

I pay 29c/kwh in a country with abundant solar, wind, coal and uranium. Perhaps there is something more at play here?

Public education about grid engineering and its challenges would be a good thing.

> France: 17 cent per kwh vs Germany: 29 cent per kwh

You can't really compare that. The 17 cent are not real prices in a competitive market. In France electricity production is mostly monopolistic & state owned - some kind of deregulation start last year. ;-) EDF is state owned. Increasing the electricity price to cover real costs is not an option, the population will vote against it. Guess who pays for keeping the old reactor fleet alive? Costs for maintenance are rising to an estimated 45 billion Euros in 2025. Guess who pays for the super-expensive new reactors like the EPR? Without government money the company which builds it would have been imploded long ago.

Germany OTOH makes electricity expensive: there are taxes, investments in renewable energy, investments in decentralized grid, research, etc.. This also keeps consumption low and creates incentives to invest in new and efficient infrastructure and electricity consuming devices.

Note also that large commercial and industrial customers in Germany get much cheaper electricity rates than domestic consumers.

Although they consume 70% of Germany's grid energy, they are exempt from (or receive rebates for) much of the green energy taxes/levies.

Shocking to see Australia's carbon emissions from electricity production. Australia has abundant space for wind and solar (and a lot of solar potential) and still gets most of the electricity from coal..

Australia's energy is so expensive -- despite most of it coming from coal -- that going off-grid with wind and solar and some batteries is disturbingly cost-effective.

We're a basket case down here. The lack of certainty surrounding energy policy means there's much less appetite for investment in this area than there should be.

Don't get me wrong, stuff is happening[1], but not at the rate it should be in a country with the properties you've mentioned.

[1] - http://www.smh.com.au/business/energy/australia-s-largest-so...

Together with the Netherlands. We don't even show as a data point on this map, but it's bad. Lots of NIMBY here with wind energy, new government has just started talking about shutting down a few coal plants, we are far behind our promises.

When you travel from The Netherlands to Germany, the sure way to recognise the border is all the wind mills.

FWIW here's a Wikipedia entry on the Dutch situation [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_Nether...

I suspect lobbying to be an element.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_Australia

Despite a huge proportion of wind Germany still produces nearly twice as much CO2 per kWh than France :(

But that's due to nuclear. I don't support coal plants but Germany is on the right trajectory to lower emissions in a sustainable way. France will still have to go through that process at some point, it's not as if they'd figured out what to do with nuclear waste.

We could have shut down our coal plants first and our nuclear plants later and would have much reduced total emissions. But we chose to do it the other way round.

Thank the "environmentalists"

There was also that incident in Fukushima that turned the political tides against nuclear power.

Humans are terrible at evaluating rare but expensive failure modes. Nuclear power is far safer than just coal mining operations, even taking into account accidents.

At least now, if a Tsunami hits Germany, we are safe.

If a tsunami hits Germany, places like Kiel will be screwed. The Netherlands too. Most of Germany will be fine.

Deaths from Tōhoku earthquake and taunami: 16,000 Deaths from subsequent nuclear plant issue: maybe 300 long term

Tsunami in the Baltic Sea (or North Sea, for that matter)?! How's that supposed to happen?

Lots of ways. Imagine a meteorite strikes the North Sea for instance (tongue-in-cheek).

I think the parent's comment may have been glib.

Tsunami in Germany would have to be caused by a meteorite in the near sea, so you are not safe :P

Could as well be caused by a major submarine landslide of the Norwegian continental shelf. There's some evidence that this did happen at least once in the (geological) past.

Bury it in the ocean? Is nuclear not considered renewable anymore?

Nuclear is not very renewable since its fuel supply is limited (although very large compared to fossil fuels).

Dumping waste in the ocean is not a great idea, because you can't be sure that fishing grounds won't be contaminated. Nobody wants radioactive fish.

In general, I think the best solution to long-term storage of nuclear waste is to keep it at some facility where it can be continuously monitored. That way, you at least know when something leaks. Unfortunately, energy producers are really good at not paying for that kind of externality.

Uranium supply is limited, but there is far more Thorium.

Thorium technology is quite immature at the moment but India and China are developing it, although it'll take quite a while to get to third, or fourth generation level maturity.

There's more Thorium in the crust, there's more Uranium in seawater. With either fuel (plus breeder reactors), the nuclear fuel supply of earth is unlimited on a several billion year timeframe at world-scale.

Well ther’s even more Hydrogen in sea water, the problem is getting it out.

Here's an entire special issue (from 2016) of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research describing progress in extracting uranium from seawater: http://pubs.acs.org/toc/iecred/55/15

Thorium though doesn't need isotopic enrichment though.

Neither does Uranium if you're using breeder reactors. And you have to be using breeder reactors if you're using Thorium because Th-232 is a strong neutron absorber and you can't start a reactor on it at all. You have to breed it up through Pa-233 to U-233 which is fissile. By definition all thorium reactors are breeder reactors. Fertile U-238 can do the exact same thing; instead of U-233 it breeds fissile Pu-239. If you want all the raw details on Thorium check this out [1].

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium_myths.html

There is actually a pretty strong case to made to say nuclear is renewable [1]. Basically, there's enough uranium dissolved in seawater that is replenished through runoff and plate tectonics faster than we could ever burn it as a civilization for billions of years. Methods for extracting it economically are very close. See this entire journal issue about the technology [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_proposed_as_rene...

[2] http://pubs.acs.org/toc/iecred/55/15

No, nuclear was never considered a renewable source of energy. It’s low-carbon, maybe.

Look, HN loves nuclear. You’ll find people here who propose running an actual nuclear reactor in every backyard. You’ll find excuses why the Sowjets were obviously incapable of securely running a nuclear plant, but capitalist societies can do it without a hitch. Then, two years later, you’ll have people telling you the Japanese were obviously incapable of running a nuclear plant, but France is obviously different. Plus, the Green conspiracy has somehow thwarted the breakthrough of cold fusion pebble bed thorium reactors, but now it’s just around the corner.

Meanwhile, in reality, it has simply become economically unfeasable to build nuclear reactors. Solar and wind are doing their version of Moore’s law. Batteries, and other storage technologies, are taking a bite out of the storage problem. Smart grids, combining load variability and harnessing end-user storage capacity for grid storage are basically there.

Your suggestion of throwing nuclear waste into the most corrosive substance available in quantity (sea water) nicely demonstrates this naïveté. There’s a post on the front page right now that shows that low-grade radioactive exposure has literally killed hundreds of thousands. Just because you can’t see it, and it was once the darling of science fiction, does not mean it won’t kill you.

Nuclear plants are only economically unfeasable to build because coal plants still are. The world is still building lots of coal plants all over the place (lots in my backyard - China is building lots, and now Japan is planning on replacing their nuclear with coal). If coal plants had to pay for the externalities of their generation you would see more interest in nuclear.

I've always thought the negatives of nuclear were less economic than other factors (though the high fixed capital costs might be an unattractive model in some cases). The worst case scenario for a nuclear accident is pretty frightening to a lot of people. While it may be true that overall fossil fuels are more dangerous in the long run, people tend to overvalue spectacular, high profile failures.

In addition, one negative of nuclear I don't see come up on HN very often, is that nuclear power plants pose an extra risk in regards to nuclear proliferation and terrorism concerns. I do think that some of the recent decline of nuclear is, in part, geopolitical. You don't see groups of nations banding together to stop another nation from building a coal plant.

Speaking of naïveté, it seems that nuclear energy is arguably renewable, and thus “was never considered a renewable source of energy” is at best, naive.

For example, http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/chowdhury2/

Correct. There's a long history of considering nuclear (with breeder reactors) renewable and a fairly strong case for it. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_proposed_as_rene...

The Japanese reactors were inundated with a beyond-design-basis earthquake and tsunami that killed 30,000 people (zero of whom died from radiation). It'd be tough to argue that they're incapable of running a plant. They just didn't build appropriately for their environment (that plant in particular was designed to be safe from USA tornados...)

Russia, S. Korea, India, & China are building economically feasible reactors right now because they standardized on a design and are building multiple of the same kind. [1,2]

Current batteries are not a feasible solution for leveling large capacity renewables. The 10-day total wind outage that just happened in the US pacific northwest kept 4 GWe of wind offline. The battery to back that would have been 100 stories high on a football field and cost $90B, and would have to be replaced every 20 years or less. Not even 100% renewable superstar Jacobsen [3] (who's suing his scientific critics) suggests using batteries for large-scale load balancing. (He uses hydro with pumped storage, which is actually not a good option due to biogenic methane emissions) [4]

Nuclear waste is a solved problem, technically. You put it in crystalline bedrock, salt deposits, or deep boreholes. The Finns are opening their repository in 2023 [5]. It's a political problem.

There's also very little of it; you're entire lifetime of waste (were you 100% nuclear) fits in a soda can. Nuclear is one of the only energy sources where it's even feasible to consider handling the total waste because of this energy density.

[1] http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/C-Russia-achieves-serial-n...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

[3] http://www.pnas.org/content/112/49/15060

[4] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

That's what you get for having the "green" party in power in Germany - they pushed for phasing out the nuclear and now it looks how it looks.

Yeah... terrible. Twice the carbon intensity of nuclear-only!

Meanwhile, Germany has half the carbon intensity of California, 1/4 that of Poland, and 1/7 Australia. With lower prices than France, and with no unsolved long-term storage problems.

Plus they arguably single-handedly subsidized solar power to where it is today, I. e. close to be competitive with natural gas.

And how they’re suffering! Unemployment at almost 4%, single most dynamic economy in Europe, taking in one million refugees with comparatively little brouhaha (10% voting for the xenophobes in this year’s election, vs. 8000 refugees and 49% for Trump in the US)

These Greens have surely been ruining Germany.

140g/kWh when the wind is blowing strongly. On average more than 500g/kWh: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/37...

> and with no unsolved long-term storage problems

It could be argued carbon emissions are an unsolved long-term storage problem.

France has a carbon intensity if 61. Nuclear power really helps. NY state is also under 200 and uses quite a bit of nuclear power.

It’s unfortunate that nuclear energy is not acceptable to many people. Hopefully, China will be successful with its adoption.

Consumer electricity price in Germany is almost twice the French price. Edit: source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing#/media/F...

yeah... try building a nuclear power plant today for whatever the (heavily subsidized and long written-off) construction costs they use to arrive at those prices.

S. Korea, Russia, India, China can build them for cheap by standardizing designs. Nuclear doesn't have to be expensive.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/C-Russia-achieves-serial-n...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

Right now the main problem we have is global warming, not nuclear waste storage, we know how to store the waste in good conditions whereas nobody knows how disastrous global warming will be, unless Germany can match the same levels of CO2 as nuclear, their efforts are pretty useless.

Specifically - how does global warming manifest itself - at present (aside from projections) as a problem in Germany?

Migration from sub-Saharan Africa is arguably caused by economic problems excercebated by global-warming related droughts.

Nobody knows how to store it in good conditions. The attempts in Germany are highly controversial.

That's a comment that you get when you only tell half the truth. While the green party was in power until 2005 and was leading force behind the intial phasing out of nuclear power, the conservative liberal government reversed that move in 2009/2010. Only after Fukushima, those people were afraid of their own electors and, in a highly populist move, reintroduced the phasing out but in a way that it while at first (from a certain, very opportunistic view point) seemed like everything would go along, was later judged that the people would have to pay the power plant operators for their losses (the bill was in all likeliness crafted especially so that the CDU-FDP government could say "hey we tried but now unfortunately and by a weird coincidence our donors still get their money back" [side node: its not the only bill that showed such a characteristic, either those people are highly incompetent ... or really really competent]).

And the end of the story: Now the nuclear power plant operators do not even run their plants all the time because under certain conditions it is not even monetarily lucrative to run them anymore. The whole thing would probably run out in the near future just because its too expensive to run.

Too bad that Germany uses coal to regulate wind power output fluctuations.

These record production peaks are sold as good things, but they are negative aspect of wind power. Only 20 percent or less of installed wind power capacity is available 90 percent of time.

So if most of the time you cut usage of finite resources by 20% - what is the down side? They can afford it so what is the harm?

Co reductions are critical but it's very capital intensive prosess. We don't have time to waste resources for inefficiencies and marginal improvements.

In denmark they are converting a lot of power plants to use straw and grain. I think the goal is to stop use non renwables sometime in the next 10 years.

I live in North Germany and there is lots of wind. The new wind turbines in the North Sea are quite efficient.

In a decade, North Germany will have a surplus of electricity and storage will be more useful. For example a one GW dc powerline will then be operational to Norway for storage - with one or two more possible. Storage in old gas storage systems either as air, windgas or in large batteries will start to be common...

This is the website I've been looking for!

Gathering together power generation and CO2 emissions for the whole world, albeit those that are publishing the data.

Strange that the data for Netherlands, Italy, and Texas are missing. Is this charged for, confidential, or just not collected?

Italy is temporarily missing (IT problem), will be back soon. Netherlands is not yet disclosing real-time figure for fossil-thermal power plant output. Texas has not yet been investigated for addition to the map. Will hopefully happen soon! feel free to contribute by adding the parser to the open source github repo https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap

Misleading headline! The Germans aren't producing wind - except those who are too much sauerkraut.

At christmas we're all sitting on our asses at home and farting. So a lot of wind is actually being produced!

I don't understand how these electricity production numbers are to be understood. Neither net nor gross energy production seem to match the numbers depicted for Germany. Why does it say, that Germany is producing 61% of its power from wind energy, when most other sources only report around 40%?

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/l... https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/l...

The key to understanding is time. Those charts your linked show averages for whole years. However the original link in question here is live data. Based on the charts it seems the percentage is updated every 15 minutes.

Shame it's still higher intensity than the UK at the moment (just)!

(And indeed my calcs don't quite match yours http://www.earth.org.uk/_gridCarbonIntensityGB.html anyway!)

They don't match mine either - https://electricityproduction.uk

Or http://www.gridcarbon.uk

For Germany as well: https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/topics/-agothem-/Produk...

Its very likely because they only use projected production and use.

Calculations details are here: https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap#carbon-intensity-c... We use IPCC LCA data for the production mix, and use a coupled linear system of equations to take into account imports in a dynamic manner.

Generation data is realtime and comes from ENTSOE (https://transparency.entsoe.eu)

Very cool.

I'm using UK-specific carbon intensity values, and breaking down different uses of the same fuel (OCGT & CCGT). I've not baked in transmission loss yet. Our results are surprisingly similar though.

Feel free to submit a pull request to update our numbers!

And look at Guatemala: https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&countryCode=GT

46% biomass! More than hydro, wind or anything else. This should be a role model.

What kind of biomass though? If they are just burning wood, then I guess it's better than direct deforestation by fire, but unless they replant those trees, it isn't long-term sustainable either.

Proper biogas. Mostly from their sugar mills, the biggest in central america.

For the UK (and France) this has a lot of geeky detail: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

UK data (inc. solar) with CO2 emissions in app form: http://gridcarbon.uk/

And also more biomass than coal! Still, those dirty coal cancer producers need to close down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_least_carbon_efficient...

Let's put wind farm on climate change amplified tornados and profit.

Do you know any other open/free live datasets like they used for the map?

https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap#real-time-electric...

http://mix.stromhaltig.de/gsi/

While I appreciate the effort, the map is misleading as the scoring/coloring is purely focused on Carbon emissions.

This means things like Nuclear power, ecologically disastrous in the long term, get a nice thumbs up (see France e.g.) because of their short term 'benefits'.

What is the problem with nuclear energy? It is very safe and very clean and provides near limitless power. Our technology has been much advanced in the last decades. Now we would only need to build next generation (Thorium) reactors. At least that's what the hivemind here told me.

French here. Besides the advantages you mentioned, the downsides the opposants talk about are:

- aging power plants, we haven't build any in a long time and many are now passed the initial lifetime expetency, but can't be shutdown as they should since there is no replacement ready

- price not taking plants destruction into account. None have been fully destructed yet, so we don't know how much it coat exactly but it's far from cheap since you have tons of midly radioactive material to treat

- still no proper way to dispose of the waste. There research etc, but right bow we're basically storing lots of materials that will be radioactive for millennias

- new generation plants project (EPR) is many years late and many times over budget because of critical defects in components.

- probably other arguments I forgot

I am personally undecided on the matter, but what is certain is that nuclear might be the best solution we have, but it certainly isn't without downsides.

Why don't we just dump the radioactive material into the ocean to dilute it sufficiently? Apparently that's what solved most of the Fukushima problem.

That would contaminate the ocean. It's easier to "dump" it (carefully and deliberately) into crystalline bedrock or salt deposits where it will remain for millions of years, well beyond the time that it is dangerous. People spreading fear about storing nuclear waste in repositories are generally lying to you or repeating lies someone else told them. It's a fairly solved problem from the technical side.

> but it certainly isn't without downsides

Neither are the alternatives. Governments, and civilians alike, should carefully weight the advantages and disadvantages. What I mainly know about it is from memory from elementary school. Because this is precisely what we did. Each group was tasked to use pictures/photos from magazines, papers, etc to make a collage and a list of the + and - of each of these sources.

That said, can someone ELI5 why Thorium is the future for nuclear energy? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

Add in that in France electricity is used a lot for heating, while most of Germany is on gas or oil. People can die from lack of heating.

> It is very safe and very clean and provides near limitless power.

Very much true. Nukes produce 60% of the carbon-free energy in the USA!

> Now we would only need to build next generation (Thorium) reactors.

There are lots of advanced next gen reactor designs with passive safety, advanced process heat, renewable fuel (replenished from erosion into seawater), etc. Only a handful of which use Thorium. The whole Thorium thing was a rebranding attempt by a guy named Kirk Sorensen who wanted to have a advanced nuclear rebirth. I don't like it because I want to see advanced nuclear of all fuels, not just Thorium! But that's a minor point.

The S. Koreans and Russians have standardized their reactor designs and built a bunch of them, and in doing so they learned how to fabricate the parts and put them together very cost effectively. The rest of the nuclear industry needs to learn from this to keep construction costs down. Options for this include:

1. Build nuclear reactors in shipyards. This is a controlled environment with high replicability. Then deliver the nukes on barges or even operate them a few km offshore with subsea cables.

2. Pick a design and stick to it. The entire industry goes around saying they have the latest and greatest design but none of them are great unless someone works the kinks out of constructing it. The best solution here in my mind is to develop national open source reactor designs.

I think you make failure to quantify error here and can't see the difference in magnitude between risks.

If we had Fukushima every few years and nuclear storage accidents happen frequently, it's unlikely that it would be worse than delayed retreat from hydrocarbons caused by aversion to nuclear power.

Isn't it that nuclear power is only ecologically disastrous for the medium term while being mostly beneficial in the longer term?

Here an article about wildlife in Chernobyl - https://www.nature.com/articles/526166a

Exactly the opposite. Nuclear is only beneficial short term.

The long term consequences are very long term, hundreds thousands of years. The problem of storing nuclear waste material is still unsolved and extremely expensive. Radiation poisoning is ecologically extremely disastrous. E.g. the shield in Chernobyl has to be rebuilt every few decades because the radiation weakens every shielding material over time.

> Exactly the opposite. Nuclear is only beneficial short term.

> The long term consequences are very long term, hundreds thousands of years.

That differs per isotope AFAIK.

Also, you could regard it as temporary solution between coal, less efficient/safe/fill_in nuclear power plants, and solar/wind/biomass. Because global warming is here right now, and we gotta deal with it right now.

I completely disagree. Using waste repositories like the one Finland is opening soon [1] keep the radiation out of the biosphere for well beyond the time it is dangerous. One soda can of nuclear fuel can provide a lifetime supply of carbon-free energy to a human at US consumption levels and make one soda can of gnarly radioactive waste. That waste is so small that it's feasible to safely dispose of it. The land, carbon, material, mining, etc. footprints of nuclear are tiny and that's what affect the environment. Nuclear is extremely clean.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

It is beneficial because it gets rid of us. The presence of humans is worse that almost any cataclismic effect, even a nuclear explosion and lingering radiation. The radiation itself isn't beneficial in the long term, if that's what you're asking.

It's not ecologically disastrous, nuclear energy is safe and the best technology we have right now.

> their short term 'benefits'.

Global warming is 1000x worse than a few radioactive waste we can store and no technology can match the CO2/Khw ratio of nuclear. Short term benefits is exactly what we need now.

Nuclear is safe, but I'm not convinced it is cost effective vs renewables and energy storage - based on the UK's next gen nuclear plants anyway. 30 years is hardly short term either.

Right now it's still much more expensive than nuclear (based on the massive amount EDF spent in France to increase the share of renewables). But I'm sure this will change in the future since prices of renewables are droping quickly.

Hinkley C isn't due to open h til about 2030 and will cost £92/mwh

Offshore wind is currently in the £60/Mwh range. Storage is in the 250k/MWH, or £900m/hr for Hinckley production.

Right now we know how to power entire countries only with nuclear power. We don't know how to do that with just renewables, which is why e.g. Germany runs coal plants whenever the wind isn't blowing like crazy. It would be much better for our carbon footprint if we replaced the coal plants with nuclear. We can always turn them off once we figured out the whole renewable+storage thing.

The map does not claim to conclude on anything else than Carbon emissions. Many other things need to be taken into account when considering decisions, and this is merely one decision (albeit a very important one!)

Because that's what this map is about: Live CO2 emissions. Not perceived dangers of nuclear power.

Nuclear power is a highly ideologised subject. In recent years in this area decisions have been made entirely based on fear and political opinion rather than scientific facts (like the relative safety of alternative reactor designs). 'nuclear' has become a hot-button word. Everything connected to it is perceived as negative. Probably some people nowadays would even argue against nuclear fusion because it's 'nuclear'.

In combating climate change by drastically reducing carbon emissions we're facing a huge task, which likely is an uphill battle we can't even really win in the short term. The best we can hope for is mitigating the consequences as much as possible.

Nuclear power is a stopgap measure that can help with that until better alternatives are available. We've been using nuclear fission for power generation for more than 50 years now. The waste generated during that time is there already, if we want it or not. It has to be dealt with anyway. Adding 20 or so more years of nuclear power generation on top of that doesn't exacerbate that problem all that much.

Trying to get rid of coal, oil, gas and nuclear power all at the same time seems like a pretty foolish endeavour.

And record high nuclear production in France...

Anyone knows why?

France has always been investing in nuclear energy, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Électricité_de_France

France's 2017 nuclear generation is well below record levels:

https://www.platts.com/latest-news/electric-power/london/fra...

According to S&P Global Platts calculations based on reactor availability, output is unlikely to reach 380 TWh this year.

Based on cumulative output of 361 TWh by December 17, output would need to average 56.5 GW over the final two weeks in 2017 to even reach 380 TWh, the TSO data-based calculations shows.

Nuclear output averaged just below 50 GW so far this December, up from 42 GW in November, the data shows.

...

EDF operates France's 58 nuclear reactors. But following record production years in 2014 and 2015 at 416 TWh, it has struggled with extended outages and lower nuclear production.

Yet the primary source of energy for Germany is coal.

Electricity from wind is nice, but on the other hand there are mass layoffs in the fossil fuel industry, like siemens and general electric owned plants in germany are shutting down. Whole cities, like Görlitz, are drowning now. The nuclear industry was butchered, too.

All in all, the EEG is causing massive losses to germany and the environment (dont forget the outsourced damage to nature in china inflicted by solar panel production!).

Deutschland has the highest CO2 emissions of all times and the highest cost of electricity of all times now. This is a severe warning to the world! Never use a socialist approach!

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